This is another book doing double duty across challenges – Nevada for my North American book tour and LGBT romance for Read Harder 2017. I didn’t realise when I chose this book for Nevada that it could also work for a challenge in Read Harder, so that’s a plus! I was going to read The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley for the LGBT romance challenge but that’s a read for another day (it’s very long!).

This is the final (maybe) tale in the Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin. I’ve not read any of the other books in the series but it was easy to get the feel of the characters. It’s a sweet tale about an aging transgender lady called Anna Madrigal, and her friends. Various love stories are woven around two trips to Nevada – one to the Burning Man Festival (a creative, radical sustainability festival – with art!) and a homecoming/leave-taking trip to Winnemucca where Anna grew up. The writing itself isn’t brilliant, but the story is enough that the actual construction of it doesn’t matter that much.

One thing to point out about this tale is that although Maupin is gay, you don’t get the feeling that that has anything to do with the stories and characters. It also avoids being political – there is no whiff of activism at all. There is no – see, we are human and have feelings too! People are just people who have love affairs, crushes and friendships.